Age of Conan and my tabletop campaign

Today I entered the wonderful world of this MMORPG through free unlimited trial and was really excited with it. Though I'm not sure that I'd drop my WoW group (yes group, not guild - we play as a kinda party of 5 and prefer to percive all the rest as NPCs of the sort :)) I've certainly felt the great atmosphere of the game.
More than that - I wanted to make my players in my 4E campagns feel the same. So after thinking it over I thought it was about tiny details which speak loads about the world outside the current place of adventuring - ships in the harbor, exotic clothes, tavern tales, legends, bard songs and so on.
Now I'm thinking about doing it on the tabletop. Will get back to it later.

Trying new things

This week games were good and let me try some experimental things.

My Lords of Chaos players met 2-hit minions. Not impressed - invoker+druid+tempest fighter don't care if they are 2 or 1 hit minions. Not for my party I guess.

My Hunt for the Queen players had a chance to try Universalis as a way of cooperative world/story-building between Heroic and Paragon tier. They didn't really like it and I wasn't impressed with how it turned out, but now I have half-a-dozen notebook pages (hardcopies, wow) to use for my paragon campaign story arc. Not bad I should say.

More of that later.

A wonderful advice on story-heavy game.

Here at DungeonMastering.
Not only article itself, but comments are also pure gold.

Building your own world,part 1

So today I'm gonna tell you about the world we've started to construct for the next campaign I'm going to run. We means me and Mathew - wonderful 12 y.o. with vivid imagination, 3 yrs of DnD and a own WoW RP-guild under his belt.
When he stated he wants to run his own game in school, we decided that this time we'll make it serious and use all the wonderful technincs we've found in the Internets.
We've spent sometime thinking if we start big or start small and decided to have kinda hybrid approach - we'll create the world to know the general location of everything, but details will be filled during actual campaigns.
After googling worldbuilding I've found wonderful 30 Days of WorldBuilding guide byStephanie Bryant and thoght it'd be cool to try it out.
And so we've started to do it together.
First day theme was called Climat and Variety and we were to determing climats and geographic places which "click" with us. The author told us to write 'em down in the notebook, but we, being computer geeks and nature lovers decided not to waste paper and just find and save some wow-pictures from the Net. So these are 8 pics that were chosen to represent key location of our world:

So here are the basic names of those places and moods we decided to give them in the order of the pictures above:

1. The Barrens - yes we play a lot :). Mathew felt danger here and I though this place to be lonely and incivilized and beautiful.
2. Penguin Coast - I felt sea winds and heard bird cries, he though it to be beautiful, but mentioned that there could be monsters in those depths.
3. Marshes - he thought them to be empty, even animals are rare here. My thought was about great and hot marsh with mists and strange aromas in the air.
4. Dragon Valley - that's Mathew who started talking about dragons here imagining that he is a member of some ancient order of dragonriders. I thought about the river turned into the roaring and dirty current during rain season.
5. The City - we both agreed that it's the center of trade and religion, maybe it was a capital when empire still ruled this lands.
6. Cold Mountains - again we agreed on this place. Both had the images of caravans going to some far places to bring luxuries this harsh land doesn't have.
7. Lightning Coast - we both though this place to be usually calm, but with fierce unpredictable storms.
8. Twisted Forest - Mathew felt danger in this place and false sense of safety. For me it was moist and intoxicating with lots of insects and maybe ridden with desease.

So these were the moods

Next time I'll tell you about weather effects and cataclysms of our world and show the basic map of it's biggest, not yet named, continent. Maybe we'll have basic ethinicities worked out by that time.

Why I use Masterplan

And so today I'd like to speak about Masterplan. This program appeared about a year ago and even though at that time it wasn't so great as it is today, I saw it's potential right away.
So what's so special about Masterplan and what it does anyway?
Since the lates 8.0 version it is called Adventure Design Studio and it's real good name for this.
The main screen of Masterplan looks like this

All the yellow rectangles are plot points which can be anything you want in you adventure - combat, skill challenges, NPC interactions, vingettes, quests and so on.
You can connect them any way you want and they automatically line up, making a neat flowchart you see above. Every plot point can be filled with detailed description and all the game stats you need. What's neat is that Masterplan helps you in mechanical stuff - which DCs you challenge needs for this party level, what's the difficulty of the encounter with those monstes will be and so on.
The program allows you to build tactical maps from tiles and then use them as maps for your plot points with different overlays and tokens.
Every plot point could be expanded to create nested plots with any level of complexity.
And another wondeful thing is that if you have a DDi subscription you can download monsters, traps and magic items from DDi Compendium and use them in Masterplan.

In short - Masterplan allow to keep all your adventure notes in one place, without needing anything else.
I highly recommend it to any 4E DM who thinks about going digital at his table.

And here are some more pictures.

GAMING WITH 3D TILES

And so the final battle is behind our party backs and they got victorius, though almost lost a rogue.

The 3d conversion of Dungeon Tiles went smothly, though I had to change the technics on the fly 'cause cutting them with the knife was rather hard and slow really.

It ended up something like this

It appeared sturdy enough, sometimes people kicked the table or were not careful with the minis and dice, but nothing fell apart, so I should say I'm pretty satisfied.

For now we have a break in Hunt for the Queen campaign. About a month during which we gonna play an interlude to show things going in the world during those three months which passed since the end of Heroic Tier play. Besides I plan to play a session or two using Universalis rules to flesh out the setting and give them a taste of intrigues and political strife that awaits them on Paragon Tier.

That means I won't have a chance to try my terrain with them, but this week Lords of Chaos players are in for a surprise.

Another surprise for them is that an NPC hafling whom there are going to save turns PC this week with a player whom I'm gonna add to real game using the Internet. Though this last one needs some more preps, 'cause I have never done it before.

3D DUNGEON TILES

So after trying several ways to make my tiles go 3d I was really disappointed. And then today I saw this pic from February and beyond article.

See the red marks for cutting? And everything clicked at last.

So here is my terraing design for final battle. I really hope that I have enough of plain 4x2, 2x1 and 2x2 tiles, but the best part of this way of doing it is that you don't really ruin the tiles. They still can be used in their usual way.

That's great. Now work-work and then on to cutting cardboard.

Oh, yes. My terrain project.